Often times the first generations of new technology are so extremely expensive, that only the rich can afford them. Then slowly, with iterations and perfections, the prices come down to normal consumer prices. Almost every breakthrough technology has been that way, car's, computers, tv's, home entertainment. The thing is, unless there's the initial generation of very expensive technology, there's usually no starting point for engineers to slowly develop improved and cheaper ways to build. It's rare a technology goes from non-existent to every consumer can afford it.
Also keep in mind Tesla isn't trying to compete with Toyota sedans, it's trying to compete with high-end BMW, Audi, Infiniti sedans. As in other automobile technologies, the cheaper sedans benefit from all the R&D that goes into the more expensive sedans, as their features slowly trickle into the cheaper sedans.
The problem with this is the entire world would have entered a global depression to teach the bankers a point. Most people would rather spare them their 'lesson', regulate them better, and prevent a world depression.
I'm not talking about during the bubble (if I was talking about bubble to recession, oil dropped from 130 to 35, so I would have said it dropped 75%). What I'm talking about was post-bubble-popping to realization-of-recession. Which was about a 40% drop. With something as inelastic as oil, a 3-5% drop in demand leads to a 40% drop in price.
And what you're saying about speculation is a natural side effect of an inelastic supply - or perhaps "slowly elastic" is the better description. When it takes a long time to increase supply and short periods of time for demand to change, it *necessitates* speculation.
I agree with you that energy prices should "tax" high energy users. I'd say one of the biggest things holding this back are older people on fixed income that can't afford capital investment in their homes to make them more energy efficient, but suffer through high energy bills every year.
When push comes to shove this one made it though because most people don't really care about using CFLs or incandescent, and nobody cares deeply about it. If we can knock a meaningful percent off our energy usage without seriously upsetting people, politicians will do it. Can't blame them.
As a side-note, I'm not sure about the math since it's an ad slogan, but I live in NYC and they had posters up for a while that said:
"If every New Yorker switched to CFL's it would save enough energy to power the MTA."
The subway and buses alone get about 7 million people a day to their jobs - and that's not even counting the massively popular above ground commuter trains. This is a measurable amount of energy we're talking about...
Energy supply is very inelastic, which means small changes in demand can be reflected by LARGE changes in price.
It should never be underestimated what a small change in energy demand can do to raise/lower prices (for all of us). Remember when the recession hit, and energy demand went down a few percent, and oil prices shot down 40%?
Also - thinking of each consumer making their own choice only affecting themselves is not accurate when you're in a market where your neighbors poor choices make it significantly more expensive for everyone.
Security, stability, plethora of truly free applications...tons of reasons that make your day-to-day tasks much faster. Hell half the reason I dislike windows so much these days is the UI, I just work faster on my fully-customized linux machine.
Even if you say these reason are all arguable, which they are, at least there are solid arguable reasons. I've seen no such arguments for MorphOS.
Apple's invested good money in chips that decode h.264 in hardware. Their chips get something like 2-3x better battery life decoding h264 in hardware than they do in software. So yes - Apple *does* have a stake in h264 staying dominant.
Because the bolded part isn't true. If it were, then you'd be correct.
Apple isn't refusing to carry porn because they don't want you to view porn. It's because they don't want to carry porn. This is so exceptionally simple.
What exactly isn't true about apple not allowing you to run programs that do things they don't want you to do? They don't want you using google voice, so they don't let google put an app up (aka they don't let you run it). They have a long history of trying to brick peoples devices who get through apples protection - why do that if it was all about the "user experience"? If someone willingly opted out of the user experience, why is apple deliberately destroying that persons user experience to preserve the "user experience"? Take your time responding, I realize you're very busy drinking koolaid these days.
This is absurd. The only thing they are controlling is the apps on their store. They are not trying to control what you think, nor what you do while using their products. AT ALL.
"AT ALL."???
How is "you're not allowed to run programs that do things we don't want you to do" not being controlled "AT ALL"? Please let's not pretend like this is just porn. They rejected a satire app a few months ago, as has been widely publicized. The rejected the google voice app - and you can bet your ass it's not because it would "limit the iphone experience". Google apps are very high quality. The reason they did it is because you're 100% wrong, they DO want to control what you do while using their products. They want to COMPLETELY control what you do - they deny you from doing anything they don't want you to do, that's COMPLETE control, the very opposite of your claim.
Actually when you have a mostly-open marketplace and you ban certain messages from being communicated there - that's the very definition of censorship.
You obscure the argument by introducing the concept of 'publication', which implies selectivity in the first place. A place that houses public offerings is more like a forum than a 'publication' - censoring those offerings by their content is certainly censorship.
RTFA - the virus isn't even the thing splitting the water, it's basically just acting as a source to channel sunlight onto the Iridium compound which splits the water. The transition metal compounds that can split water have been around for years (check JACS, you'll find dozens of articles), the thing that keeps this whole thing so far from being feasible is how expensive those compounds are in comparison to the energy they allow you to generate.
The only "story" about this "story" is how computer nerds always easily find ways to convince themselves they're smarter than specialized scientists in other fields after reading a dumbed down summary of a paper.
I'm not sure what capitalist society you're talking about, but you need to visit some inner-city schools and spend some time in those neighborhoods and tell me about how children born there have the ability to create their own happiness. Then think how it'd be one hundred times worse if schools were fully private, as libertarianism deteriorates the situation.
I'm not quite sure how the progress of ones life being dependent on the wealth of their parents is giving the individual the ability to create their own happiness... Libertarians are every bit as much out of touch with the realities of society as communists are.
As many philosophers have spelled out over time, the only way to fairly consider a social system is to imagine a system where you were randomly reborn tomorrow as anyone inside that system, and the one where you're most likely to live a good life is the fairest system. If you're honest with yourself you'll realize in a completely libertarian system 90% of people will be miserable, as the intelligent people take everything they can out of the system and hold it for their own. In a totally socialist system 99% of people will be miserable because it denies the basics of human motivation and everyone suffers. In a pragmatic system that combines the two (something libertarians fail to grasp), the most people are able to live good lives. The hard part is where to draw that line. Never trust an idealist, they're blinded by their own self-certainty. The hypocrisy of your post is you complain of the idealistic liberals who think they're smarter than you, when your own post stinks of self-certainty and idealism.
Aside from Gentoo? Gentoo is as capable as anything else once you get it set up. That's a consistency of Linux as a whole. Once you get it fully configured it just works, forever. I've had gentoo *desktop* boxes with uptime in the years before I decide to upgrade the kernel (usually motivated by some slashdot article with cool new kernel features, not a necessity). And FWIW, I've tried switching to Ubuntu a few times, and had to quit due to obnoxious memory leaks, much slower binaries, and an extreme difficulty to configure anything non-standard. I'm not saying gentoo is right for everyone, it's not, but I can't imagine picking ubuntu if you're a linux expert.
If you were having to constantly do maintenance work on gentoo, you probably didn't know what you were doing...
Yes but the question would be: is this situation due to drug use, or *illegal* drug use with absurdly high prices, and the infestation of both organized and unorganized crime to support the black market of illegal drug use?
No 13 year olds are going to be whoring themselves out if crack were legal market price. It'd be a couple quarters for a rock... Now a lot of 13 year olds would die of heart attacks....but that's a different story.
How many people drive cars that are >15 years old? Probably a decent amount, but way under a majority. That suggests that even if you just were to switch new cars over to this engine, within 15 years a solid majority of people driving would be converted.
In other words, I don't buy your point. There's no reason we can't switch over the same way the car companies have now embraced gas-only-hybrid.
And your logic suggests that wealthy people never buy new cars;) That's absolutely absurd logic with a dozen gaps. You don't seem to realize that the wealthy *continuously* buy new cars and give up their old cars via lease or selling it used.
"As cheap as ever" is even an understatement. We're talking a couple pennies a mile if you could run your car off of electricity off the grid. Even if the hydrogen were an order of magnitude more expensive, if the car could be built so that it could run 50-75 miles a time on a battery, most people would get their commute drive for extremely cheap and it would offset the higher expense of hydrogen.
Yes, but solar panels covering your house could collect the energy that could be converted (albeit inefficiently) into hydrogen which could run your car. The energy source would be solar, the storage system would be hydrogen.
Sure you might still need to suck some energy off the grid to create enough hydrogen, but even if the grid is burning fossil fuels to provide energy, it's doing it a HELL of a lot more efficiently than a car does.
The key is to get everyone producing as much as they can at home, and then getting the rest off the grid. Then the grid can be converted to green over a long period of time and it will be seamless.
Yes - there's a commentify module. You can bind it to any key, I use ctrl-c. Then you can combine it with anything you want (ctrl-c on a selection comments them all, pressing 10 before ctrl-c comments 10 lines, lots of other options, holing control and hitting c 5-times to quickly comment as you go).
Every place I've ever worked at had a network drive that you knew would keep your data safe and backed up, and then full access to your normal hard drive (including locally stored my documents) which was used to store non-critical information, and your own knowledge of its potential for loss. That's not a rare setup at all, unlike what you might pretend.
And FYI, I worked at one of the largest business software companies in the states, and one of the largest pharma companies in the states - so no, it's not limited to tiny companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows is completely free of viruses. Oh wait.
Often times the first generations of new technology are so extremely expensive, that only the rich can afford them. Then slowly, with iterations and perfections, the prices come down to normal consumer prices. Almost every breakthrough technology has been that way, car's, computers, tv's, home entertainment. The thing is, unless there's the initial generation of very expensive technology, there's usually no starting point for engineers to slowly develop improved and cheaper ways to build. It's rare a technology goes from non-existent to every consumer can afford it. Also keep in mind Tesla isn't trying to compete with Toyota sedans, it's trying to compete with high-end BMW, Audi, Infiniti sedans. As in other automobile technologies, the cheaper sedans benefit from all the R&D that goes into the more expensive sedans, as their features slowly trickle into the cheaper sedans.
The problem with this is the entire world would have entered a global depression to teach the bankers a point. Most people would rather spare them their 'lesson', regulate them better, and prevent a world depression.
And what you're saying about speculation is a natural side effect of an inelastic supply - or perhaps "slowly elastic" is the better description. When it takes a long time to increase supply and short periods of time for demand to change, it *necessitates* speculation.
When push comes to shove this one made it though because most people don't really care about using CFLs or incandescent, and nobody cares deeply about it. If we can knock a meaningful percent off our energy usage without seriously upsetting people, politicians will do it. Can't blame them.
As a side-note, I'm not sure about the math since it's an ad slogan, but I live in NYC and they had posters up for a while that said:
"If every New Yorker switched to CFL's it would save enough energy to power the MTA."
The subway and buses alone get about 7 million people a day to their jobs - and that's not even counting the massively popular above ground commuter trains. This is a measurable amount of energy we're talking about...
It should never be underestimated what a small change in energy demand can do to raise/lower prices (for all of us). Remember when the recession hit, and energy demand went down a few percent, and oil prices shot down 40%?
Also - thinking of each consumer making their own choice only affecting themselves is not accurate when you're in a market where your neighbors poor choices make it significantly more expensive for everyone.
Security, stability, plethora of truly free applications...tons of reasons that make your day-to-day tasks much faster. Hell half the reason I dislike windows so much these days is the UI, I just work faster on my fully-customized linux machine.
Even if you say these reason are all arguable, which they are, at least there are solid arguable reasons. I've seen no such arguments for MorphOS.
Apple's invested good money in chips that decode h.264 in hardware. Their chips get something like 2-3x better battery life decoding h264 in hardware than they do in software. So yes - Apple *does* have a stake in h264 staying dominant.
Because the bolded part isn't true. If it were, then you'd be correct.
Apple isn't refusing to carry porn because they don't want you to view porn. It's because they don't want to carry porn. This is so exceptionally simple.
What exactly isn't true about apple not allowing you to run programs that do things they don't want you to do? They don't want you using google voice, so they don't let google put an app up (aka they don't let you run it). They have a long history of trying to brick peoples devices who get through apples protection - why do that if it was all about the "user experience"? If someone willingly opted out of the user experience, why is apple deliberately destroying that persons user experience to preserve the "user experience"? Take your time responding, I realize you're very busy drinking koolaid these days.
This is absurd. The only thing they are controlling is the apps on their store. They are not trying to control what you think, nor what you do while using their products. AT ALL.
"AT ALL."???
How is "you're not allowed to run programs that do things we don't want you to do" not being controlled "AT ALL"? Please let's not pretend like this is just porn. They rejected a satire app a few months ago, as has been widely publicized. The rejected the google voice app - and you can bet your ass it's not because it would "limit the iphone experience". Google apps are very high quality. The reason they did it is because you're 100% wrong, they DO want to control what you do while using their products. They want to COMPLETELY control what you do - they deny you from doing anything they don't want you to do, that's COMPLETE control, the very opposite of your claim.
You obscure the argument by introducing the concept of 'publication', which implies selectivity in the first place. A place that houses public offerings is more like a forum than a 'publication' - censoring those offerings by their content is certainly censorship.
RTFA - the virus isn't even the thing splitting the water, it's basically just acting as a source to channel sunlight onto the Iridium compound which splits the water. The transition metal compounds that can split water have been around for years (check JACS, you'll find dozens of articles), the thing that keeps this whole thing so far from being feasible is how expensive those compounds are in comparison to the energy they allow you to generate.
The only "story" about this "story" is how computer nerds always easily find ways to convince themselves they're smarter than specialized scientists in other fields after reading a dumbed down summary of a paper.
I'm not quite sure how the progress of ones life being dependent on the wealth of their parents is giving the individual the ability to create their own happiness... Libertarians are every bit as much out of touch with the realities of society as communists are.
As many philosophers have spelled out over time, the only way to fairly consider a social system is to imagine a system where you were randomly reborn tomorrow as anyone inside that system, and the one where you're most likely to live a good life is the fairest system. If you're honest with yourself you'll realize in a completely libertarian system 90% of people will be miserable, as the intelligent people take everything they can out of the system and hold it for their own. In a totally socialist system 99% of people will be miserable because it denies the basics of human motivation and everyone suffers. In a pragmatic system that combines the two (something libertarians fail to grasp), the most people are able to live good lives. The hard part is where to draw that line. Never trust an idealist, they're blinded by their own self-certainty. The hypocrisy of your post is you complain of the idealistic liberals who think they're smarter than you, when your own post stinks of self-certainty and idealism.
Aside from Gentoo? Gentoo is as capable as anything else once you get it set up. That's a consistency of Linux as a whole. Once you get it fully configured it just works, forever. I've had gentoo *desktop* boxes with uptime in the years before I decide to upgrade the kernel (usually motivated by some slashdot article with cool new kernel features, not a necessity). And FWIW, I've tried switching to Ubuntu a few times, and had to quit due to obnoxious memory leaks, much slower binaries, and an extreme difficulty to configure anything non-standard. I'm not saying gentoo is right for everyone, it's not, but I can't imagine picking ubuntu if you're a linux expert. If you were having to constantly do maintenance work on gentoo, you probably didn't know what you were doing...
No 13 year olds are going to be whoring themselves out if crack were legal market price. It'd be a couple quarters for a rock... Now a lot of 13 year olds would die of heart attacks....but that's a different story.
In other words, I don't buy your point. There's no reason we can't switch over the same way the car companies have now embraced gas-only-hybrid.
And your logic suggests that wealthy people never buy new cars ;) That's absolutely absurd logic with a dozen gaps. You don't seem to realize that the wealthy *continuously* buy new cars and give up their old cars via lease or selling it used.
"As cheap as ever" is even an understatement. We're talking a couple pennies a mile if you could run your car off of electricity off the grid. Even if the hydrogen were an order of magnitude more expensive, if the car could be built so that it could run 50-75 miles a time on a battery, most people would get their commute drive for extremely cheap and it would offset the higher expense of hydrogen.
Sure you might still need to suck some energy off the grid to create enough hydrogen, but even if the grid is burning fossil fuels to provide energy, it's doing it a HELL of a lot more efficiently than a car does.
The key is to get everyone producing as much as they can at home, and then getting the rest off the grid. Then the grid can be converted to green over a long period of time and it will be seamless.
You could always mount using shfs (ssh file system) and edit it that way - making sure to keep your temporary file in a local place.
You do realize you can bind macros to keys in vi too? I've never understood this absurd argument from emacs people..
Yes - there's a commentify module. You can bind it to any key, I use ctrl-c. Then you can combine it with anything you want (ctrl-c on a selection comments them all, pressing 10 before ctrl-c comments 10 lines, lots of other options, holing control and hitting c 5-times to quickly comment as you go).
Wait - there's a world outside the states? j/k..I didn't realize it was still US-only.
Aside from emusic which rules for indie picks - with amazonmp3 out there, I can't understand why anyone would buy any drm music period any more.
And FYI, I worked at one of the largest business software companies in the states, and one of the largest pharma companies in the states - so no, it's not limited to tiny companies.